BANK OF MOVES AND SUBMOVES FOR THESIS WRITING

Abstract

The current widespread availability of corpus-based software applications has had an extraordinarily liberating potential for ELT practitioners. As language instructors, it is now possible with relative ease to conduct in-depth research into our learners needs, and thus develop materials on a strongly principled and research orientated basis. Observing the difficulties post-graduate students had in constructing the intended meaning and getting their message across in the challenging process of thesis writing, in-depth research was conducted to determine the main difficulty obstructing students. What was of significance was that although the students were of different nationalities, from different academic disciplines, of different academic and social backgrounds, and at different stages of writing their thesis, they displayed similar problems in academic writing. When in-depth corpus analysis revealed that the main problem hindering post-graduate students from producing accurate and appropriate text was their insufficient knowledge of lexico-grammatical patterns, further corpus analysis into a target corpus was carried out, and a bank of moves and submoves based on lexico-grammatical patterns was generated. This bank is based on the four main moves (Introduction / Methodology / Results / Discussion- IMRD) and the corresponding sub-moves in thesis writing, and now serves as an indispensable resource for post-graduate students, and researchers, in producing academic work that is accurate, appropriate, and therefore acceptable in the global academic community.